Saturday, February 19, 2011

The cherry blossoms are blooming, and I find myself making bad decisions.

The song for this post is MC5's "Miss X," but, for my purposes, it's "Miss Ex." Why break up with someone you know you're in love with? So in love, in fact, we made heart-shaped wet spots:Who wouldn't want to sleep in that?

The thrice weekly blow-outs made it clear that we were making each other crazy. Correction: we were already crazy but we were trying to make each other our own brand of crazy. We were square pegging a round hole. It was going to take some serious work, and, while Hermann Goering reaches for his revolver when he hears the word "culture," I reach for my pillow when I hear the word "work." I've been sleeping my dreams away for nearly four decades now. Winner winner chicken dinner! Why not throw it all away and "re-evaluate"?

Yes, the cherry blossoms are blooming, and I find myself making some very bad decisions:

In terms of good decisions, the decision to see my ol' homey Danny Buzzard, of former All You Can Eat and current Fast Asleep punk rock fame, is a wise one.

Danny Boy works at Santa Cruz bikes and hooked my pal Josh up with a new Nomad.That's not it, and neither is this:But they are the new carbon Nomads, which are indeed the shizz-de-la-nit, if you're into the crabon. Anyway, we headed to the old cannery in SC where the magic happens, and Mr. DB gave us the grand tour.

Here's an aisle full of brand new fancy goodness for completes:Frames everywhere, resplendent in candy colored powder like something out of Willy Wonka:Josh's bike is revealed hiding in the pisser. Look at that motherfucker. He's going to smile his face right off his skull:Nothing like seeing a few cases of $100 seatposts and stems sitting around like they were potato chips. Each one of these boxes represents a month at work for me:People get bored in Candyland like anywhere else, I suppose:If you were to jump into these boxes you'd come up bleeding. It'd be the most expensive ass kicking you'd ever get:Titties:Junk in the trunk:Just in case you forgot:The new raw Nomad--clearcoat over aluminum:Waiting on powder:Oven to cure the powder:People exposed to toxic fumes often have a predilection for the metal:This is the decal dude. He puts on the water decals before clear coat. And, apparently, he eats a lot of acid:So David Lee Roth and Dee Dee Ramone walk into a bar...Who wouldn't want a beer when powdering frames all day?SC fell for the rasta bike craze as well:Syndicate bikes sitting around the paint shop:More candy:The NHS (Santa Cruz Skateboards) have a bunch of ramps for lunchtime sessions:This was seriously a Wonkavator: a wheel-building machine. A goddamned robot! (Remember, that's pronounced "ro-butt.")Wheel dude (clearly, I was not taking notes) had a Red Wine hat on. Take that, Toph!The nipple-putter-onner machine:That's the wheel in the middle with the ro-butt nipple tweakers busily tweaking 1/6 of a rotation at a time:Danny even gained us access, via the super friendly ace mechanic Doug Hatfield, into the Syndicate Attic to check out the factory riders' bikes:Greg Minaar's V-10:They all had these fancy carbon rims:And, when you're Greg Minaar, you get custom decals on your fancy rims:Peaty's old ride:Minaar again:While Danny was giving us a tour one of his coworkers in another part of the factory yelled: "Get back in your hole!" In truth, though, it was a pretty nice hole, complete with King Diamond woodwork and silicon sealant sculpture:Right before we got back to Danny's hole, we passed a shaven-headed guy talking on his cell phone near the trunk of a BMW. "Dude," Danny whispered. "That's Roskopp." It was kind of like walking by George Lucas while on a tour of Lucasfilm, or, perhaps, like walking by the real Elvis (the one that's still alive, not the one who faked a drug overdose while taking a shit) while buying bacon and barbiturates in Memphis.

Apparently the guy's on the skate side of things vibe on the bike guys because "Roskopp doesn't skate anymore."

Are you kidding me? Ha! Skaters, for such a "do your own thing" crew, can sometimes be more pinched and insular than surfers, who are mostly just dicks. We did run into one of the skate guys while we were looking for the bike part of the complex , and he was crazy nice while giving us directions, so the reports of the skate/bike feud may be somewhat exaggerated.

Once again, Danny, thank you. Josh and I (mostly Josh) owe you dinner and a case of beer, if not a handjob. Like I said--mostly Josh. You made a retarded boy's dream come true:After Josh bought himself a combo Christmas/Birthday present, we met up with Stevil Bieber at Little Tampico for some Mexican fandango fabuloso. Steve tried to MacGyver the pen into a blowdart gun but failed miserably:Steve also revealed the sacred hit count, which, without actually revealing it (this would be the equivalent of a junior sorcerer posting a master wizards favorite spell on the internet), is multiples of what this blog gets in a year. But in a month. But hey, I'm movin' on up.

Speaking which, let me apprise you as to how last post's keyword spamming mania fared:Not very well. Maybe a few more hits, but not a ton of wacky search phrases. I do take comfort in the fact that as many people found my blog by looking for it by name as those who found it looking for "diaper masturbation," which was a kink I didn't even think to include:Hoo-fuckin'-ray! Yippie! [Sorry, I just nutted in my Huggies.]I've been stressed as a motherfucker lately. I've been trying to get a job wrenching in a bike shop. Seems easy enough, but it's yet to pan out. The recession is squeezing most shops, in addition to it being the off season. I had an interview a couple weeks ago at a place that ended up hiring a part time sales guy instead. Why take a chance on a mechanic when you can train a high school kid to wrench in your own image for much less? It always makes me cringe when I'm asked, "What's your shop experience?" Motherfucker, please! I wrench on bikes more than all of your employees combined do in a week, and I do that shit for love. I taught my fucking self, with advice from mechanic friends, of course, all of who should be running their own shops, or have. When I was 12 I'd disassemble and rebuild my GT Pro once a week. Yeah, I haven't worked in a shop since I was 18, but I know how to swing a wrench. Quite clearly:I'm still on the hunt, but I'm also on the hustle, trying to build some bikes and sell them out of my house, like hip-hop tapes out of the trunk. I need to get my taxes straight so I can get a resale license and up the profit margin before getting an actual storefront. Eyes on the prize.

Yesterday, I had a Jules-like revelation. A moment of clarity, if you will:

I was sitting at my desk, writing, and had to take a break to pick up my daughter and our friends' daughter at school and take them to dance class. Had to dig through a fucking jar of Classico Roasted Garlic pasta sauce, carefully picking out the quarters, to have enough scratch to get the kids Clif Bars and water for a snack before dance.

In addition to my relationship derailing, this month my roommate moved out, which is fine, as I need the space--but now I've got to pay for all of it. My camera broke. I had to borrow over a thousand bucks from my boss to get the boot off of my truck. Anywhere else in the country except New York I'd live in a four bedroom house for the price I pay on my hovel--an it'd be a fucking mortgage, not rent. Portland has been looking good for awhile. My Portlandian friend Luke claims that it's "where people move when they can't hang in SF, LA, or New York." Maybe, and maybe that's why it's looking awfully good. Every time I get a clear enough head to see I'm a rat on a Habitrail wheel, it depresses the fuck out of me. Hand to fucking mouth, and even I don't know where these hands have been. It's the stress factor, got me down.

I'm grindin', but I'm not making the paper. That means I need to grind more, until I disappear into a bloody pulp, or run some Tony Montana type shit. An empire woven together with chain links and brake cables.

Hickey reminded us that "Everyone's a Whore," and this is true--but whores get paid and all I've got is rugburn on my knees.

SF, as much as I love her, is getting me down. People are so rude. They're concerned about shit like merging. While on my way to pick up the kids, Clif Bars in my pocket, this woman in a brand new BMW with a Stanford license plate frame sped up so I wouldn't merge in front of her. Pinched like a premature turd. It was my turn, but she wasn't having it, because she was doing some important shit.

Worse is realizing I drive like that all the time--10 minutes late out of the gate and tripping, needing to be there then instead of be here now.

I don't need junkies in wheelchairs telling me my dog is too close to them. I don't need crotchety bastards swearing at me when I ride my bike. I don't need cops sweating me for drinking a beer in the park. I don't need someone to always be behind me or in front of me on the sidewalk, and I'm getting sick of standing in line and waiting in traffic. I don't need someone living all over me.

A big part of my job is telling people not to take their beers out of the bar. Invariably, a large percentage of these people are Euros. On the one hand, it's annoying as fuck--you're not in Rome anymore, Caligula, so don't do as the Romans. On the other hand, when I take a step back, what kind of a fucking country is the Land of the Free and you can't even walk down the street drinking a beer for fear that you'll pervert the kiddies, whose parents are most likely raging closed door alcoholics who don't love each other anyhow. It's a goddamned Babyfood Nation.

Then again, maybe people do too much shit in public:

I hope this doesn't make me sound like a fucking kook, some kind of Ron Paul groupie or militia member. I'm not looking to get away so I can build a gun-infested fortress that'll protect me from Mexican immigrants until Jesus comes. I don't need a gun and I'm not worried about zombies or criminals. I just need some fucking space. I need some space to think. Some space to breathe.

I've got the world up my assAnd I'm gonna move fastBe the firstWon't be the lastI've got the world up my ass

Society is burning me upTake a bite, spit it outTake their rulesRip 'em up, tear them down

Twisted mind, withered brainYou know I'm going insaneI just tell them to get backWhen they tell me how to actI've got the world up my ass

You know I've got the world up my ass

I need a space that's fucking mine. I know it's all pissing on fire hydrants, but I don't want to have to break my balls grinding every month to pay for someone else's livelihood. Fuck that.

Yeah, I know. I had every fucking opportunity. I know how I got here. I've got it upstairs, in the brain, but somehow I've always lacked the motivation. All head and no heart, too much of a full belly and not enough Knut Hamsun style starvation. Society isn't burning me up, so much as I am. In the words of the Fugazi song, "I burn myself I am the fuel." I've been writing about alternative social structures--the Mesa, Christiania, Kowloon Walled City, Carville by the Sea--because I need a change, because I'm not excelling and I need to. It's really on me, isn't it? It's never too late to Rise Above.

As those of you who follow this blog may know, I've recently had a laugh about the stats page, wherein I can see how many folks stumble--drunkenly, I hope--into my little corner of the internets while searching for things like "pictures of men with jumbo or super-sized testicles" and "bart simpson is ficking." Not fucking, mind you, but ficking.

So I figured I'd play a little trick on the internet and just spam the fuck out of this post with a list of titillating (tits! titties!) smut keywords and see how dramatically my hits went up. While originally invented by Al Gore...oh wait, this just in: Al Gore did not invent the Internet. (Nor did he really even claim to.) Anyway, while the tangled e-web we weave was the brainchild of a bunch of eggheads at MIT and UCLA in the late '50s and early '60s--guys who had nothing better to do (i.e. they couldn't get laid) than to dream up with a world wide web, how could they have known that other guys decades in the future who also couldn't get laid would use it almost exclusively to fap to midget bestiality porn.

I shall observe and report, dear reader, the veritable hit explosion, the orgasmic release of millions upon millions of big dick anal fuckdream accidental re-routings to a blog that, sadly, is only incidentally pornographic. And, if you've found the Magnet in a search to rub one out, why don't you just relax and sit for a spell before moving your well-lotioned fingers on to the next Sasha Grey video? Really, though, with all the free porn clearinghouses out there, you're a pretty inept jerk off if you stumbled here during a search for spankable visuals, so I don't feel too sorry for you. Leave an angry comment below.

Speaking of comments, how does one ask for them without seeming to be an insecure high school girl begging for approbation on her Tumblr or Mindspring page? I get more comments on the "hey, I have a new blog entry" status updates on Facebook than I do on the actual blog. And really, I care: I want to know what you're thinking out there. Who's that I see in my magic mirror? The quiet, delusional type reading this on her iPhone on a Minneapolis public bus, sitting across to the angry guy rubbing one out to Sasha Grey in the Land of the Ultramidgets?

Have I sent you closer to the edge or farther from it?

And while we're speaking of the edge, check out this upstanding young man, perhaps dubiously labeled a crackhead, from what can clearly be seen in background as the sparkling jewel of American metroplexes, Trenton, New Joisey:

I love it how the guy videotaping does nothing but question his own sanity for capturing the trainwreck on tape while he halfheartedly prays for a safe-landing. But the best part is, after the jump, when Flipdude is decompressing from his own insanity and marveling at his mostly functional extremities inside the fine establishment purveying ghetto goods (otherwise known as the "Shop 4 Ballers")--big shiny wheels, brightly colored Champion jackets that look like they're made for an overgrown five-year-old T-ball kid:

"That was super fun."

Fucking amazing. My hero. It's really too bad I don't live in the neighborhood (hell--looks like somewhere I can actually afford), because I would start a dead pool as to this dude's impending death date. He can't be long for this world, and why not make some scrilla on his clear lack of self-preservation instinct?

Only other person I've seen even remotely like this guy was an Indian named Sonny from the outer reaches of Northern Canadian Nowhere. By "Indian" I mean the feather kind, not the dot kind. I'd say "Native American," but that seems kind of weird in that he was from Canada.

I was 20 and working in the Nautilus salmon-processing plant in Valdez, Alaska. Sonny showed up in camp one evening around sunset, playing into the stereotype by carrying a mostly empty fifth of whiskey and screaming a bunch. Somehow he ended up with Roland's stun gun. Really, who knows how these things happen? It's like the Chekov saying:"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." Sonny existed, deux ex machina, to fire that pistol. Or, in this case, that stun gun.

A bunch of half-sick college kids looking for adventure and "easy money" (don't believe the hype) in Alaska, sprinkled with rail-riding hobos of the old school variety and lam-of-the-law misfits and n'er-do-wells, we gave Sonny a wide berth around the campfire that night. He started off by shocking himself in the neck with the device. His head bobbed back and forth like an electrocuted rag doll, but he kept talking. The words bubbled up from the back of his throat in a gargle: "These things," [gurgle gurgle], "aren't shit!"

That was the moment when I realized I, the aforementioned half-sick college kid, a product of waterslide suburban summers and cherry Kool-Aid, was witnessing someone who truly did not give a fuck. Not one. Not one half of a fuck. Not one iota of a fuck. If we hadn't been living in tents and cars, I'm sure he would've gladly flipped off a house.

As it is, he went down to the glacial run-off river the next day and decided to "surf" on top of a four door sedan as it off-roaded by the side of the gray water. Off falls Sonny and breaks his spine, only to die in the hospital around 3am.

Every so often you have these moments of awareness. This guy is what? 22? 23? How did he make it so long? How is he not dead yet? Then, another drunken day in the Great White North, and Death comes ripping. Guess it's better to go find it then let it find you, right?

Nonetheless, dumb luck counts for a lot in this life.

So does having PMA, which I've got to dial in myself lately, after a couple aggravating street hassles in my 'hood of late.

[For anyone keeping track of my incessant linkings, I've probably linked to that Bad Brains video twenty times...and I'll damn well keep doing it, too.] While on the subject of PMA and the 'Brains, I came across an awesomely yellow 1985 Kuwahara Puma mountain bike frame and fork. Immediately, I thought of building a rasta-colored Bad Brains tribute bike. Well, not really--my lady Laura suggested the colors, and after that Bad Brains motif came to mind rather readily.Kuwahara branded bear trap style headset, Puma logo:Now it's a Bad Brains model:Red brick pattern cruiser tires by Duro:I dig these Mesinger/Troxel style waffle seats:The bar tape is Cinelli in the world champion stripes. I over-wrapped the blue so it wouldn't show. Tektro levers and a cool Schylling revolving bell:The Kuwahara graphics are the tits:KMC chain, single speed adapter, Chopsaw gear and bolts, Wellgo plastics. Chopsaws are awesome American made CNC machined chainrings--super straight, available in a ton of different sizes and colors, in five bolt 110 BCD or 4 bolt 104 BCD. If you don't know what that means, then clearly I should be building your bike for you:Frame is made from Tange chromo tubing, as you can see by the sticker on the seat tube. Cranks are Sugino A/T:Dice valve caps are a must:Rear wheel is a Sun Rhyno Lite with an XT hub:Odyssey Slic Cables and sweet anno green Dia Compe cable hanger. If you look closely, you can see the cable end has a little green die on it:Basket is a Wald 137. Wald is one of the oldest bike accessory companies in existence, and I've been diggin' the 137. Not too huge, perfect for one or two bags of groceries. Not too heavy. Cheap but sturdy:Style for miles, G:Can't you just see HR cruising around on this? High out of his mind and talking to aliens:Colton bought it before HR had a chance to call me up:I took the above pics on my iPhone because my beloved Nikon shit the bed. It's currently at the Nikon repair facility in El Segundo, looking for Q-Tip's wallet, I guess. ("Ali got the fruit punch.") When I get $260 to get it out of camera jail, I'll be able to take quasi-legit photos again. If you have a spare Franklin burning a hole in your pocket, I'll gladly take it off your hands.

On the serious tip, though, Tip--I got fronted some cash and I'm building about ten bikes right now--a few old rigid frame mountain bike conversions like the one above, an old Raleigh 3-speed ladies bike in root beer brown with fenders, a single speed city bike with fuckin' tweed brake cables (?!), a clean, workmanlike Lemond road bike, a Columbus-tubing chromoly Univega single speed (cooler than it sounds), at least one BMX...so get at me. I'll have a shit ton of rad stuff built up in the next few weeks, and if you're walkin', you're hurtin'. (Actually, if you're walkin', I'm hurtin'--I need to sell this shit.) Also available to do repairs, tune-ups, bachelorette parties, kids' birthdays, light housework, and drug deliveries. No windows.

Then again, I suppose you could always hire a child clown to build you a bike for less, or perhaps, to entertain you at a discreet adult party:

Okay, I'll do windows.

I've been posting about alternative, off the grid communities lately--Kowloon Walled City, Christiania, the Mesa, and a bit of Slab City--hopefully the desert road trip will go down in March, as I'm too busted ass to do it this month. The next installment of Experiments in Alternative Living is San Francisco's own, mostly long gone, Carville by the Sea.The subject of a beautiful book by local historian Woody LaBounty, Carville was a community made of formerly horse-drawn streetcars located around what is now 47th Ave and Lawton, but was then sand dunes and dirt roads. When electric streetcars became prevalent in the 1850s and '60s, the old horse cars were sold for $20 a pop. A whole community sprang up of people living in the cars. Not only were houses made out of the cars, sometimes stacked into multiple story dwellings, but there were shops, a "coffee saloon," and a church.

There are a couple Carville houses known to exist today, one of which used to look like this inside:But has since been unfortunately remodeled to remove all traces of the streetcar it once was. The other is made of three cars, and still shows it's origins:The above is the only picture I can seem to find, and I can't find any exterior shots of this house, so if you happen to know who lives in this Carville gem, or it's exact location, let me know. I'd love to bug the current residents to let me take a few shots inside.

Finally, I'm reluctant to include in this post any mention of my daughter, seeing as how it started, but I came up with my porn keyword spamming scam a week ago, and today's my kiddo's birthday. (Happy birthday, D!) I normally wouldn't feel compelled to share that, necessarily, but yesterday I visited her classroom to see her act in a play about Cesar Chavez.She did a great job, of course, though I didn't bring it up to puff her up with fatherly pride. The charts on the wall behind her are about how to read and respond to literature. Now, in my motley "career" as a drifter and layabout, I've made a dollar or two as a writer and editor, a TA in a college lit class, and a substitute teacher. Which is only to say, I am keenly aware of spelling. You can't see in this photo, but in these charts, D's teacher misspelled "judgment" seven times, and also fucked up on "preposterous" and "assassination."

For "judgment" she wrote "judgement" and for "preposterous" she wrote "prepostrous." The first is a commonly misspelled word, which makes it especially grievous to my busybody, spelling Nazi way of thinking in that, hey, if it's fucked up on often, you should know that as a teacher. And fucking the same word up seven times on one wall means it's not a mere typo. The problem I have with the extra "e" in judgment and the missing "e" in preposterous is that, in both cases, they lead to a change in the syllable count. The two syllable judj-ment becomes jud-jeh-ment. The four syllable pre-pos-ter-ous becomes three syllables when you drop the "e": pre-pos-truss.

My babymama Kristina was sitting in front of me for the play, and I know she noticed "judgment" since she's a lawyer and probably sees that word fairly frequently. She did notice it, along with a botched "assassination" attempt, and it also drove her batshit. Without trying to bust her out in front of her class, I quietly mentioned something to the teacher before I left.

"Um, it's not a big deal or anything, but I noticed you spelled 'judgment' wrong."

"I did? Where?" she replied, scrutinizing all the instances where she'd spelled it incorrectly and seeing nothing.

"It's J-U-D-G-M-E-N-T. There's no 'e' after the 'g.'"

I don't think she believed me on this count, and she definitely seemed annoyed. I can't blame her on one level, in that she'd had to wrangle fourth graders all day. (Though the major wrangling during the presentation was done by the beleaguered outside drama teacher, who had to feed some kids all of their lines.) I know I must seem like a horribly pinched busybody to some of y'all reading this, and I probably seemed that way to her.

On the other hand, was I really so out of line? I mean, what the fuck? This is the fourth grade, not grad school. She wasn't spelling prestidigitation or antidisestablishmentarianism. Plus, there's the matter of it being her job to teach my daughter how to spell (as well as mine, and her mother's, granted). Beyond this, she's also at least partly responsible for instilling good writing habits in her pupils, one of which is looking up words you're not sure of. In Ye Olden Tymes when I went to school (which was probably around when she went to school, as we're about the same age), we had to check our spelling on these old fashioned things called dictionaries that were made out of trees and had little black splotches called "ink" on them. Nowadays, with the new-fangled compuboxes everybody seems to have, you can check it by simply sending an electro-mail to God or whatever you do.

Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And yes, folks--spelling counts. It may not be the most important thing a teacher does during the day, but it counts. And to D's teacher: I ain't mad at ya. Pedagogy is a hard row to hoe: I discovered this while teaching summer school math to inner city kids going into the 7th grade. Their hormones were going batshit, it was a nice summer day outside, and they spent most of their time drawing spurting dicks in their math workbooks and eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos. One girl raised her hand and quietly told me, "Deanna is lighting a fire in her desk." So, you, know, I feel your pain to some small extent. But it shouldn't be beyond the pale to expect a teacher to spell words correctly.

And, while I'm being totally righteous, what about bicycle rights?

Portlandia is the raddest show going right now, hands down. Makes me want to visit again soon.

The raddest poster going right now is this pie chart punk rock comparison by Dan Gneiding:Actually, it's the raddest poster gone, as the pre-orders sold out, though he's thinking about doing a reprinting. I hope so, because I shit the bed on pre-ordering one. Curiously, Mr. Gneiding is a senior graphic designer at Urban Outfitters. This isn't curious in and of itself, but only curious because a certain Stevil Kinevil hipped me to this poster and to Dan's work, and he fuckin' HATES Urban Outfitters for doing reproductions of his favorite Budweiser sweater, and, basically, for co-opting anything remotely cool and mass-producing it for style-challenged assholes.

I had my own experience with this when I was getting a tattoo done about five years ago at Black Heart Tattoo. Jeff Rassier was wearing a ring-necked T-shirt with none other than RL Osborn doing a table top or something on it.

"Yeah, nice BMX Action Trick Team shirt," I told him.

"Huh?," he replied and stared at me blankly.

"Your shirt. It's RL Osborn."

"Oh, yeah. I guess. I got it at Urban Outfitters. I just thought it looked cool."

Which is not to say that it didn't, or that Mr. Rassier is one of the aforementioned style-less assholes. But, c'mon--know what you're reppin'. My friend Tony met a guy at a party once with a tattoo of the Einstürzende Neubauten logo. When Tony commented on the tattoo, the guy replied, "Huh? Oh--you mean the Henry Rollins guy?"If Hank had a tattoo of a target-headed, squiggly-armed stick figure on him, then heck, this guy was going to get one too. I just hope he likes taut, German industrial weirdness. Or not.

The funny thing is, Bob Osborn, RL's dad, already sued Huggies (or was it Pampers?) for using one of his photos on some pull-ups (Extreeeeeme pull ups! no doubt) and came away with a shit grip of money. Wonder if he knew about the UO swipe? Assuming he took the photo, that is. Who knows, he might have just sold them the image. Then again, maybe he sued Urban and Mr. Gneiding, assuming he worked there five years ago.

What I'm saying is, it's a small world, and nothing is new. As a blogger who routinely jacks images from the matrix, I can say that intellectual property ain't what it used to be. It reminds me of the Associated Press vs. Shepard Fairey throwdown.Was the photo the iconic image, or was the artistic reworking that made it iconic? I'd argue for the latter, though as a photographer with no drawing/painting/printmaking skills whatsoever, I'd better watch what I say before my work ends up on a Urban Outfitters shirt. (Who am I kidding--Hey, UO, wanna buy a photo?) And isn't the job of a street artist/graffiti writer to re-purpose what's already there? Marcel Duchamp did not invent bicycle wheels or stools, but he re-purposed, or, more accurately, de-purposed them into art:Does Campbell's have a case against the estate of Andy Warhol?If you put a bird on it, is it art? Maybe, but is it yours?

While on the subject of bikes, Portland, art, and intellectual property, Stumptown's mighty Shad Johnson recently had his shred boner decidedly deflated when GT, or whatever mega-conglomerate owns Gary Turner's name nowadays, issued him a cease and desist order over the appropriation/homage winged Goods logo.This stirred up some shit on the innerwebs, mostly to the effect that you can't make a dead brand relevant by suing the balls off of a local BMX shop. I'll remind Shad that parody counts as fair use, so he might consider reworking the GT wings into something like Mark Gonz's elbowing of the first skate conglomerate, Powell Peralta.

Before:After:I feel a T-shirt coming on: picture a giant spurting cock with little arms and legs tabletopping on a BMX bike with GT-style wings around the outside of the whole thing. The Shred Boner, anthropomorphized.

I'd buy one.

One intrepid reader of The Come Up--it's not hard being "intrepid" when 90% of the comments are 13-year-olds calling each other "fag"--suggested that the GT wings might not be as original as they claim:Somewhere, at this very moment, a lawyer has a record-setting, pants-splitting, sue-happy shred boner.

Well, we started with dicks, and we finished with them. Funny how that works. Now for the randoms:

About Freak Magnet

Instead of farting out infinitesimal whiffs of inspiration on Facebook, I'm trying to return to something a little more focused, though interspersed with the flotsam and jetsam of hypermodern, interweb-addled post-reality. Among the things that motivate me are: music, bicycles, women, literature, graffiti, skateboarding, a very lowbrow type of fashion, beer, coffee, food, and fatherhood. This blog might be about all those things or none of them. As the years have gone by, my interaction with my world has become more ephemeral. Freak Magnet V.2 marks a course change, a turn into the wind, an attempt to juxtapose the absurdity, incongruity, intensity, and inanity of my life into some kind of raw-boned creative output.